Of all the expensive objects that we lavish our life’s blood on, none experiences such a precipitous fall and subsequent rise in respectability.

In a way, our beloved vehicles are like prostitutes. They start at the top as gleaming, shiny things. Expensive even in their cheapest incarnations, we fawn over our vehicles. I had a friend who celebrated his first night of ownership sleeping in the driver’s seat of his new Mustang convertible.

Then time passes. The floor gets slimed and the thing begins to rattle inexcusably. Worse, the new car smell – that wonderful and intoxicating jumble of ungodly off-gasses – vanishes, only to be replaced by french fry smell, dog stink and worse, spilled kid stuff odor.

Still, some remain constant. I had an aunt who once had her husband pull over on a country road in Upstate New York so she could roll up the windows on an abandoned 1949 Dodge that merely resembled a 1949 Dodge that she owned for 20 years, a car she called Queenie.

Such is love by association.

And it is that association to the life lived inside our vehicles, coupled with a healthy dose of brand marketing, that gives rise to that moment when people and corporations realize that such past possessions and past products have become part of the historical fabric.

So maybe I’m putting too fine a point on all this. But I’m a car guy who enjoys car museums, especially and surprisingly this: the museum of a car company that went from nothing to mass prominence in my own lifetime. A company that only seemed to notice in the last decade that it had manufactured a legacy.

That and a story. Which is why, a decade ago, Susan Sanborn became the curator and vintage vehicle collection specialist at the Toyota USA Automobile Museum.

Not that it is an even a moderately known fact that Toyota – lately, famously and sadly in trouble for corner cutting – established its North American vehicle museum here in its North American company town, Torrance.

The collection is in a bland, unmarked warehouse on Western Avenue that you couldn’t find with the help of a crystal ball. Nonetheless, it is open free to the public by appointment and open for free to charitable organizations that might want to use the immense building and its remarkable collection as a fundraising backdrop.

Still, it’s odd to visit a place that will remind many of us that we have lived during the entire U.S. advent of a car line begun in Japan by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937.

It was later changed to Toyota because the number of strokes needed to write the name in Japanese reduced the characters to a lucky eight. With an even luckier number being the 2 million or so cars they now sell each year.

Their first U.S.-export vehicle, the Toyopet Crown, arrived in 1958, the same year the federal government mandated the automobile retail price sticker.

In all, they sold one Land Cruiser and 288 copies of this grossly under-powered car, an unfathomably small number when you consider that last-place Buick alone sold 257,124 units that same year.

I just wonder if Detroit even noticed this relentlessly advancing speck on the horizon.

Fact was, I didn’t know the line existed until the Toyota Corona came out in 1965. And then, two years later, the sleek 2000GT made a big splash when it was driven by Bond-of-Bonds Sean Connery in “You Only Live Twice.”

I don’t know if I pleased Sanborn – a true lover of the brand and this $14 million collection gathered from private owners, estate sales, dealers, car clubs and anywhere else she can find them – by calling the sleek two-seater a Jaguar XKE knockoff.

Only I’m guessing, as a former XKE owner, that their version actually ran. They have three in the collection (of only 54 in the U.S.), with the premier model being one once owned by Twiggy and now valued at $1 million.

But the real story began in 1968 with the Corolla, which went on to become the world’s best-selling passenger car, with 27 million sold in 140 countries.

By 1975 Toyota was the best-selling foreign brand in the U.S. And everything from the 1936 Model AA to their race cars are here in a space that also contains the line’s U.S. archives.

Sanborn herself loves the hunt, loves hearing from families wanting to pass along mint-condition Toyota Tiaras, Camrys, Stouts (precursor to the Tundra) and tough-looking, old Land Cruisers found in dusty garages.

Mostly, she loves working with the car clubs, some of which are built around single models. Then there’s the Toyota Owners and Restorers Club and the Japanese Classic Car Club.

“These are people full of energy and enthusiasm, people with real pride of ownership who will help each other out with parts and information,” said Sanborn, who looks at her work as an ongoing research project extending back to Sakichi Toyoda, a loom inventor who turned his profits over to son Kiichiro, a young man who wanted to build automobiles.

This is a good collection, too, an assemblage of concept cars, experimental cars, green cars, first-off-the-line cars, rare cars and surprisingly expensive cars. Who knew that a 1971 Camry that originally sold for $2,800 can now be worth $40,000?

There are movie cars as well, like the 1989 Toyota truck used in “Back to the Future” and a fantastic collection of motor sport vehicles, like Ivan Stewart’s SCORE desert truck and a 2007 NASCAR Camry.

If this is the kind of thing that you’ve been looking for, then this is it, the thing you’ve been looking for, Toyota heaven.

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